Tell The SEC To Make Corporations Reveal Their Political Donations

It has been two years since the Supreme Court decided in the infamous Citizens United case that corporations can spend unlimited amounts of money on political campaigns. Since then, our democracy has been drowning in a tsunami of corporate special interest money. Our government is under the thumb of the Koch brothers instead of the hands of the people.

We cannot ultimately right this wrong until we can organize the states to pass a constitutional amendment that declares what everyone except Mitt Romney seems to understand: corporations are not people and money is not speech.

But until then, we can take action right now to force corporations to make their campaign spending public.Sign the petition and tell the SEC: No more secret political money. Make all publicly traded corporations disclose their campaign spending to the public.

PETITION TEXT:

We the undersigned urge the Securities and Exchange Commission to enact a new rule requiring all publicly traded corporations to disclose their political spending to their shareholders and the public. The shareholders of a corporation have the right to know how their money is being used. And the public has a right to know who is trying to buy our political process. Unless the SEC takes this action, our democracy will be in the hands of an anonymous few instead in the hands of the public. Please use your power to make our democracy transparent again.

Public Citizen is also trying to drum up pressure on the SEC to require corporations to reveal the money they are giving to politicians. This is so important I’m just going to repost their letter:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s disastrous ruling in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission unleashed this flood of unaccountable corporate money.

The bulk of this corporate money actually belongs to shareholders — mostly working people who have a 401k or similar retirement plan.

As the federal agency with the job of protecting shareholders from corporate abuse, the SEC can step in to stop Corporate America from using the public’s retirement savings and investments as its secret political war chest.

Be sure to add your thoughts about why transparency in corporate political spending is important to you!

Requiring publicly traded corporations to disclose how they’re trying to influence elections is a first step that can make a big difference in 2012. Let’s make sure that we can hold accountable the corporations that funnel money into Super PACs and other groups attempting to tilt the election without disclosing who they are.

About Dave Johnson

Dave has more than 20 years of technology industry experience. His earlier career included technical positions, including video game design at Atari and Imagic. He was a pioneer in design and development of productivity and educational applications of personal computers. More recently he helped co-found a company developing desktop systems to validate carbon trading in the US.